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05.01 – 05.07

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Work

I made some buttons less shameful.

I wasn’t aware of the museum definition of Visual Story until recently. We’re looking to improve how we create these and I spent some time thinking about requirements and looking at what other people do. A pleasant change to be reading and thinking instead of hammering away in a code editor.

I don’t feel like I got much else done, but it was a short week in my defence.

Life

As a life-long drummer, erstwhile dj and sometime over-indulgent clubber I didn’t have baby-screaming-at-me on my bingo card for how my left ear was finally going to pack in. But here we are. Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel’s back (it was a fairly hefty straw tbf).

The journey to The Lakes was unfeasibly good all things considered. Only stopped once at Rugby services albeit for an hour and a half (little man got maximum value from the playground). Baby girl screamed for the last hour or so, but we’ve put in the training and that was easily survivable. I’ve never known the little man to be so well behaved for such a long stretch. Least of all in a car. Worst part of the day was getting everyone in the car (little man relatively lucky not to have been murdered by at least one of us). Second worst part was getting little man to bed. A lot of unexpected entries on this bingo card.

So good to be in the company of old pals and seeing their kids another year older. Little man immediately announcing that he wanted to ‘go back to my London’ bringing a strong metropolitan elite vibe. Mostly hilarious, slightly embarrassing, slightly heartbreaking.

I wasn’t emotionally prepared for the amount of bunting and union jacks festooned on Coniston. Mad as all heck.

Baby girl did her most impressively catastrophic poo while I was looking after both kids and bae went for a swim in the lake. My dear friend Dave looked on, filled up his pint and versed me (unprompted) in the relative merits of a combi-storage boiler while I dealt with the fallout from the little lady’s bum. Fun times! Twenty-four hours have passed and I’m still not sure I’ll ever feel clean again. But I do have some invaluable boiler knowledge.

On a whim I had a crack at coding Conway’s Game of Life. I’m fairly happy with it. I’m aware it is a popular interview coding task. I am not looking for a new job.

See the Pen Game of Life by David McCormick (@davidpmccormick) on CodePen.

Listening

• ShopTalk episode 563 – interesting thoughts about AI, and alerted me to perfect-freehand for quickly creating and copying svgs (then optimised with SVGOMG yeah?)

Reading

• Circles and Momentum – “I’m going to try and be more mindful of noticing the directional momentum of seemingly circular paths”. Same
• Lego googol machine – in the ‘practical limits’ section the author notes that nobody would ever see the final gear turn because the earth would have fallen in to the sun by then
• Blue skies over Mastodon – “I would love to see even half the kicked-anthill energy being spent hating a closed beta app directed toward making Mastodon better for more people”. Same

TIL

• The M in ‘vim’ stands for iMproved

Running

Monday around the marshes. I spent an extra five minutes foraging for the smell and found this innocuous-looking tree/shrub when I was about to give up (again). Siri Knowledge has offered up Prunus Mahaleb as a possibility and I’m inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.

A sprig of a shrub with some green leaves

Wednesday hills. Thursday hills. Saturday a loop up Coniston Old Man – confident it’s got higher and steeper since we were here two years ago. Couldn’t resist a last-minute little loop of Old Man’s lower slopes on Sunday afternoon too.

Coniston Old Man and surrounding hills behind a wooden sign that reads, 'RESERVED FOR ICE CREAM VAN'